As the house declined to get done, I braved the architect, the contractor, and the workmen, and arrived one day in company with a bed, a table, and a chair (also a husband), and took possession.
I did have one treasure at the time—a caretaker. She saved my life, and she protected my innocent self from the British tradesman, whilst she gently taught me what the British servant will and will not do. She informed me when I was paying twice as much as right to the obsequious tradesman, and she regulated the (to me) perplexing fee. She was very religious, and I think she looked upon me as her mission and that she was to rescue me—which she did. Her wages were one pound a week including her food, and to be just I could not have got such a treasure in America at the price.
The most obvious defect we discovered in our house was that it was very cold—a universal English drawback—and the inadequate open fires seem to accentuate the chill.
Would that my feeble voice could do justice to the much-calumniated American methods of heating! It does pay to be less prejudiced and more comfortable! Possibly the furnace and steam heat may be a little overdone, but not with moderate care. No one can make me believe that it is healthy to sit shivering all over, or roasting on one side and freezing on the other. Neither do I consider a red nose and chilblains very ornamental. I admit that furnaces are not a crying need in England all through the winter, but from December to March it is a pretence to say you are comfortable, for you are not. There is no doubt but New England has bad throat and lung troubles, yet so has Old England and the hardening process does not save, if statistics are right. If I must take cold and die, at least I prefer to do so comfortably.
If there were a furnace I should not need gas-stoves (which are certainly no more poetic than a register or a radiator, besides being distinctly sham), nor would there be a perpetual procession of coal-scuttles going upstairs, unless an open fire is desired for additional warmth and cheerfulness.
This brings one to the relative costs of coal, water, and gas. London coal is greasy, soft, and dear. Where the hard coal is burned in the States, it leaves white cinders and ashes. It burns slowly and is therefore very profitable, and the price averages about twenty-four shillings a ton. Must the cheek of English beauty always be adorned with "blacks"?
The water-rates here are just double those of Boston, where, O rapture! we had two bathrooms, and where the "sidewalk" (American for pavement) was thoroughly washed every morning. In Boston gas was charged for at the rate of four shillings for one thousand cubic feet; here we pay three shillings for the same, and yet for infinitely less gas used our bills here are mysteriously larger. Our London electricity is both expensive and poor; consumers are at the mercy of the companies, and a little wholesome competition is very imperative.
The English are reckoned a nation of grumblers, but one finds that the grumbler ends in grumbling, though in moments of supreme anguish he writes to The Times, which permits, with the impartiality of Divine Providence, both the just and the unjust to disport in its columns.
Considering the papering and painting of the house done—the painting done very roughly from our point of view. Then the kitchen needed a new range and so we got the most expensive of its kind—expensive for America even—but the acknowledged solidity of English workmanship (which sometimes becomes clumsiness) is well in place here. The dinner-lift had been constructed for one flight, and was surprisingly dear, while the parquet floor in the drawing-room cost twenty-seven pounds where it would have cost fifteen pounds in America.
This brings me to a point on which I wish to lay great stress: the remarkable progress in America in all the applied and domestic arts within the last ten years, which leaves England far behind. Our English house was just old enough to be surprisingly ugly—it belongs to the early Victorian period. Without wishing to spend too much money in its decoration, we did feel that we ought to put away the funereal mantel-pieces and set up something more æsthetic.